Employer Strategies

Zone had grown weedy. As the corporate intranet for Quintiles - a biopharmaceutical services company headquartered in North Carolina - QZone had remained virtually unchanged for eight years. It was a fairly traditional intranet containing corporate news, links to various applications and calendars, along with benefits information. But it had stopped growing and evolving with the rest of the company's digital strategy. It was time for a change.

Later this month, employers will know - based on the Supreme Court ruling whether to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - if their employees must have health insurance. Should the law and all of its provisions be ruled constitutional, the cost of offering health benefits may prove too much for some employers, allowing employees to seek coverage from state-run insurance exchanges.

As a (very) busy mom and wife, I sometimes find myself regarding circus performers with unadulterated scorn, thinking to myself, "Look at him, juggling his knives like it's hard or something. Pfft! Try juggling a full-time job, a husband, two (almost three) kids, one dog, four schedules, a house, and bills - and then ask me how tough juggling just plain knives is!"

As I was thinking about a topic to share my "vast" knowledge and information with my benefit peers, it occurred to me just how much I don't know. If it's not regulations and politics yanking our chain, it's the financial markets undoing what we thought we knew historically about trends; it's our employee demographics changing; it's the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation changing rates and the Department of Labor issuing guidance; it's the vendor and consultant landscape changing with mergers or core business focus; and it's the evolution in financial products. So here are the many things I am not:

When you know better, you do better, so the saying goes. For Brocade, a Silicon Valley-based high-tech company, the knowing came in the form of a trust survey the organization conducted in 2009 as part of its participation in the Great Place to Work Institute surveys. That trust index survey revealed that women ranked Brocade lower than their male counterparts in 95% of categories. And even though Brocade ranked high overall - achieving a spot on the nation's Great Place to Work list in 2009 - CEO Mike Klayko wanted to dig deeper into what was going on.

Ever wonder what makes successful advisers successful? Independence and technology are the leading factors, according to four advisers at TD Ameritrade Institutional’s Elite Summit, but some of the other factors were even more surprising.

Despite taking proactive steps to keep their finances in check, only a third of American workers (34%) believe they are saving enough money in order to live comfortably in retirement, according to new research from the Principal Financial Well-Being Index.

A National Partnership for Women & Families report released for Father’s Day, “Dads Expect Better: Top States for New Dads,” includes an analysis of state laws and regulations governing paid leave and workplace rights for new fathers in the United States.

The annual growth rate for U.S. health care spending will hover near historic lows in 2013 and rise at a modest pace for much of the next decade, even if the Supreme Court allows the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to proceed, according to a government report released this week.

A full 42% of employee benefit managers hope the Supreme Court will this month rule that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, according to research conducted by Employee Benefit News.